Edmonton’s Kathleen Andrews Transit Garage (KATG) is a municipal bus maintenance and storage facility designed to set new standards for an often-overlooked building type. Reconciling demanding technical requirements with simple and rigorous architecture, KATG elevates a conventionally utilitarian building and honours its important role within a growing, equitable, sustainable, and resilient contemporary city. Functional efficiency and high sustainability are matched by formal refinement, historic preservation, and public art, enriching both the lives of the people who work there and the wider community it serves.
As the ways people consume and share art and culture evolve, museums around the globe aren’t just changing their programming and offerings to attract visitors, they are also approaching the design of the museum itself in a way that enhances the visitor experience, creating a space for community members and tourists to convene and enjoy the museum’s offerings in a complete, immersive experience. No longer are these buildings designed as post-war fortresses—they are now welcoming, animated buildings that engage their communities.
The new Walterdale Bridge in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada creates a striking new entrance into the downtown and a unique gathering place in the heart of North America’s largest urban parkland.
The bridge is a gracious, single span, twin through-arch steel structure, spanning 206 m (greater than the length of two football fields) from bank to bank across the North Saskatchewan River in the heart of Edmonton. It carries three lanes of northbound vehicle traffic, a sidewalk to the west of the roadway and a separated footbridge or shared-use path for pedestrians and cyclists to the east. The project also included the realignment of two major roadways to connect to the new river bridge alignment. The result is a signature structure that blends with its natural setting and creates a landmark gateway to the city’s downtown.
The Renovation and Renewal for the University of Alberta’s Faculty of extension provided a collaborative hub that merged collective and indigenous learning spaces. Located in Edmonton’s Enterprise Square, this updated learning center is the main learning place for thousands of continuing education students each year, and this collaborative space contributes to downtown revitalization.
Many food+beverage clients require design solutions for multiple locations, both nationally and internationally. McKinley Burkart recognizes the need for design that is scalable and adaptable, with individual elements that can be repeated and evolved effectively whether for two or 100 locations. Furthermore, McKinley Burkart believes in the power of interior design to develop a strong brand message and customer familiarity. The concept for Earls Crossroads, and future Earls locations, was to open and lighten the space while incorporating timeless materials that would patina over time. Ensuring design longevity, natural stone, wood, leather and concrete were used throughout the space. Creating a cohesive customer experience between multiple restaurant locations, McKinley Burkart aligned the design with the national brand. By focusing on a consistent tone, with distinct recurring components, rather than a cookie-cutter design, each restaurant location, is unique yet on-brand. The overall aesthetic creates the ideal space for comfortable and stylish dining and embodies notions of a laid-back cool vibe.
VAULTED WILLOW by MARC FORNES /THE VERYMANY is an architectural folly exploring lightweight, ultra-thin, self-supported shells through the development of custom computational protocols of structural form-finding and descriptive geometry. The project’s aim is to resolve and delineate structure, skin and ornamentation into a single unified system.
schmidt hammer lassen architects´ first built library in Canada, the Highlands Branch Library in Edmonton, Alberta, has officially opened. The 1,500 square metre library, which was won in 2010 with local Marshall Tittemore Architects, provides the Highlands’ community with a distinctive landmark which underlines that this new creative centre for learning is open and accessible.
Each fall High Desert Test Sites (http://www.highdeserttestsites.com) invites artists to create experimental projects adjacent to California’s Joshua Tree National Park. This year HDTS invited Ball Nogues Studio (http://www.ball-nogues.com) to create a structure in a remote region of the Mojave Desert. This presents a unique opportunity to draw upon an unfettered landscape at a grand scale. Expanding on theories developed by earthwork artists, our project, entitled Yucca Crater (working title),will re-imagine these concepts through new methods of production linked to our cross-disciplinary artistic, architectural, design and fabrication practice.
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